In small companies there is the occasional role of the Accidental DBA (type that into an Internet search portal if necessary… from 10.000 feet it’s just about a developer taking sysadmin/devops responsibilities), these are typically less-than-part time occupying tasks one of your developers is taking care of, with more or less success and conformity.

The Accidental DBA is in great trouble, so let’s get straight to the helping tips for her/him.

Step #1 – Understand your mission as the cork of the bottle.

Imagine this wine is the evil shenanigans you have to confront, you are the cork preventing evil from spreading out of the bottle. That, my friend, is your job.

#1 – Be aware of your responsibilities.

In other words, the first thing you are going to learn, no matter if one way or the other, is you have to make sure the first time an incident happens is the last one. That’s the reason they are called incidents. If not, they are another different thing. If you are just a little meh about this, resign now while it’s not too late.

Step #2 – Get in charge and show them who is in charge now.

You belong to me.

#2 – Get those folk the f$%^ out of there.

Quite a part of your problems come from your fellow developer colleagues, so never too soon to begin retaliating back. Mercy is for the weak.

Find some kind of way to establish a private or semiprivate repository. Ensure the persistence of your knowledge after your death by bringing read write credentials to a selected part of your team, never more than half of your team and in no case more than two or three trustworthiest fellow developers. Ask them not to change your stuff unless in moments of great need, or if absolutely necessary, like your holidays or so.

You need to do this as is pre-charging a bill on your team in payment for all the future pain you are yet to get (#5 later on this document). Also your stuff is not their thing, things being strict. And many of them most probably won’t even really care, even though they possibly are making like it seems they do. And they really have important business-related development stuff to do anyway. It works the same as with management. You want them for they free you from having to deal with their stuff. They are your Accidental DBA abstraction layer. So you are going to be OK on your own… Most likely.

Step #3 – Know everything all the time.

Theo knows everything about you all, and Penny is eager to find you and kick your ass.

#3 – Get a big enough information delivery pipeline.

Following the article about automated service and server information delivery up with this mini raid into the particular facet of the Accidental DBA needs. Adding up to the scarce information your cloud provider is giving you about your data bases, each one of them (or the alternative dedicated agent/s) should report your platforms vitals residing in your data bases. What? You say you don’t have any of those? Think again. Believe us, your platform has vitals residing in your data bases. Either as information or as meta-information. You are going to know.

If you cant really run code on all your data bases because you dont know, or you suck at it, or it seems you can not do in all or any of them can not; just code something written in your favorite programming language, abstract it in a way you can host it in different forms, but don’t try to code every one of them at once and please please please do a favor to your future self and make it not only simple but do the actual main deployment of it in a server-less style.

Chances are you have to manage a multi vendor data bases ecosystem, so look carefully what do you need to abstract data base operations regardless the exact type, vendor, family, and even paradigm if you can. Even though mileage may vary, we encourage you to write a connection (or cursor, ugh… don’t get dirty with the technical insights right now…) wrapper using a well known (if possible also well known to your team) programming language for which data base libraries are already written for all the vendors and families of all your data bases; its not hundred percent sure, but chances are you are going to need either Java or Python here. Too bad those two are not at all the better languages to code in 2018, fortunately soon those will be just a remembrance.

Step #4 – Release an endless storm of fire.

Long you have waited until this cathartic day when you finally come to enforce the rules you already warned of.

#4 – Automatic issue management.

An issue is the same as an incident, it just was detected early on its buildup and got taken care of before becoming an actual incident.

Establish a process (meaning,.. a business one, you know) to limit the data base connections of all the data bases at the company, not just the SPOF master/s, or your read write data bases, but also the read only replicas; or your abstract cluster or your multi master replicas, if you / your company could afford any of those operation models.

E.g. make sure data base connections are closed when reaching a particular number over a given level, measured on a per-user and per-host and per-application basis. At first it will be hard because your fellow developer colleagues may have not coded their applications in a way so those report their application name, if so, you are going to need to fix that first… and remain vigilant of possible rogue new applications, as long as you are serving as the Accidental DBA of the company.

The last couple paragraphs of the previous step apply verbatim. But do not try to achieve this step together with the previous one, or it is you who will burn in flames.

Step #5 – Face the unknown.

It’s like I’m suddenly in another world. And there I feel… cold.

#5 – Master trans vendor migration.

At some point, if not because management (or, hopefully not, mis-~), eventually stuff and sh will arise and you are going to need trans vendor migration. Arguably the most typical type now is from opensourcedb to proprietarydb, on an unexpected turn backwards of history; but probably as a society we have somehow achieved a maturity were the two directions are happening at the same time in similar rates. If numbers dont seem to be fitting to your point of view, bear in mind that a large piece of that cake is really about deploying proprietary provisioning of opensourcedb, so assign numbers considering that freedom and surely you can understand the rationale then. The middle in there is actually a quite large grey area you can consider either proprietary or open as you might need.

Moving forward from the digression, at some point you will end up having recently migrated (as in different data base vendor) a data base and turning out that the application tier is not really hundred percent compatible, although in pre-production seemed to. This is a rare case because the data base migrations are not taken lightly, but even so, still stuff and sh can slip and permeate through the intensive screening development folk did. It can relate to a malfunction in a service of your own platform which has worked OK… all the time during and before the migration from its very inception, revealing itself in all its toughness only after the migration seems to be concluded.

This is frightening. If not, you were a bad pick to serve as the Accidental DBA, so shame on your boss/employer! This has necessarily to be frightening because it likely can be the source of the hardest incident in your career as Accidental DBA.

Here at the company, it so far seems we were lucky enough to have detected this one before it caused an impact, and believe us it could have been quite a bad strike. But that has also a lot to do with the fact we collectively decided to go on with the steps towards Accidental DBA Nerdvana way before being hit by an incident that would absolutely have justified it post mortem.

Yeah! We successfully performed trans vendor data base migration, it seems so far! We have a draft trilogy of blog entries about that, hopefully we will release that at some point.

Have this small appetizer: software people use to do this… really really suck.

Step #6 – Remain vigilant.

You need to be always in control, else nasty stuff is going to happen sooner or later.

#6 – Keep the reach towards constant Nerdvana. Don’t let it go down.

If you went that far, congratulations, so your data bases are no longer SPOF (but chances are you are now… yet, in any case, to way a lesser extent than those data bases were when you started); chill out, just a little bit, and keep up the hard work because that’s the true source of Nerdvana. That’s how you keep the evil held back in the bottle.

Sorry for the spoilers.

Throughout this article we picked IP bits from the series LOST, The Walking Dead, The Following, Game of Thrones, Stranger Things and Black Mirror. Madiva doesn’t own any rights on the six images shown in this post. We care about your intellectual property. So you see we played nice with your stuff, please do the same with ours.